Charles Landry's Manifesto for Creativity

Charles Landry, author of The Creative City, is the keynote speaker this morning. He notes how creativity has become something of a universal mantra, and is generally seen as entirely good and positive. It may be important to take a more critical view of creativity now, and especially of the claims to creativity which so many cities now make. Most creative city strategies are about enhancing the arts as well as the creative industries, which is fine, but what's important is also to expand from this - what would be a creative bureaucrat, or a creative environmentalist?

The idea of the creative community, the creative city, is different - it is far more all-embracing, and encourages openness and tolerance and thus has massive implications for organisational culture which must be addressed. It is important to create environments where we can think, plan, and act with imagination - where ordinary people can act in extraordinary ways if given the chance. One of the principles is to involve those affected in creative city plans. This means thinking on the edge of your competence rather than at the centre of it. Innovation happens at the boundary of difference, where things can really start to occur. This means asking practitioners to act in slightly different ways from their established practice. The creative city, then, is an attitude of mind; it is dynamic, not static. Landry argues for a culture of creativity to be embedded in the places in which people live.

This is a process of divergent thinking, much of which will not be useful or productive, but which nonetheless produces ideas which can be explored further. This requires an infrastructure of the mind, in which the mind is relaxed about possibilities, as well as requiring a spiritual level. The soft infrastructure is about the thinkers, the doers, and the creators, about formal and informal institutions - but so many of them look and feel like factories. The soft infrastructure is, or should be, a place where the maverick flourishes, and this creates a culture of entrepreneurship.

Creative places are not comfortable places. People have what you do, because you're pushing at the boundaries; the new collides with the old, and that creative rub establishes a dynamic and tense equilibrium, a point at which things happen. Very few places, though, are comprehensively creative for a long period of time - they are successful because they're on the edges, they're not being watched, but their own success might then hinder further creative exploration as a style becomes established.

There is a distinction between ordinary, innovative, and visionary leaders - rather than simply creating policy, or combining policy with new ideas, the visionary leader creates a story, a vision of where they want to go, and then develop a tactically flexible way of getting there. But the problem is the mind: it has deep furrows, and we get used to the furrows we travel in; these furrows grow deeper as we et older, and our mindsets grow more inflexible. Shifting furrows enables us to shift trajectories, and my doing things differently we may do different things. And thus, transformation is a lived experience which is constantly refreshed; 'interesting' places combine the old and the new.

What has now been recognised is that the sources of competitiveness and survival for cities are cultural richness and depth, and this has influenced urban redevelopment and repositioning. What is necessary now is to learn how to learn, and the professions need to align the ways in which they thing with a greater range of perspectives. Mixed experiences rather than pure expertism are now a competitive advantage.

A lot of this is about tension and dilemmas - many of which cannot be solved, so it is important at least to know the existing faultlines. And we also need an ethical framework for this new work with creativity - one which encourages and nurtures tolerance and openness. Every period of history also has its own form of creativity; today's is the idea of cross-questioning, cross-fertilising, crossing boundaries. Today it is important to see the parts and the whole at the same time, seeing the woods and the trees at the same time, and thinking horizontally and vertically at the same time. And this also needs to involve bureaucracy - not only in the sense of making bureaucracy more creative, but also in learning from bureaucracy in its sense of rules and organisation. Charles concludes by suggesting that we need to identify projects that add value and values simultaneously - and that the next round of creativity is 'soft creativity'.